I guess that makes me even less than a "novice" user. I think only the first step involves an "out of the box" experience. FWIW, I have to use the unit "headless" and my desktop runs on Win 7, so I have to do the additional steps.

My only consolation is that I learned to use several of the commands required only because I had to mod a NAS (the torrent client didn't work very well), and maintaining that plus trying to replace the HD later (due to imminent failure) was not a pleasant experience for me. But minus having to mod it, I'd say that was an "out of the box" experience: the NAS and torrent client were ready to run and accessible via the Windows desktop.

My preference is a small torrent box with ready-to-run OS and torrent client which I can access remotely, and where I can just connect an external HD that I can read, format, etc., using Windows (so that I can backup, copy, or move the torrent incomplete folder, etc., if needed), and back up torrent data such as trackers, the tracker queue or list, and torrent client configurations. That way, if something goes wrong with the software, I can just restore configs and put back the trackers, etc., and if the HD needs to be replaced, I can do so easily.

I find NAS enclosures expensive, but at least I can replace the HDs if needed. I thought of new routers that now come with DD-WRT and torrent clients, but my router is still working fine.

Thanks for sharing that! Right now, I'm using an older netbook (costs similar, running on XP but with lower HD storage) and an external HD. Once the netbook stops working, I'll consider that, esp. given the HD included.

RAM matters to an extent, but it is far from the constraining factor in most cases. 64 MB of RAM is definitely a little low for running an OS and a torrent client, but the 256 MB (or 512 MB if you have the second revision) of RAM in the Raspberry Pi is more than sufficient as long as you don't have X running.

For a cheap, low-power dedicated torrent box, the Raspberry Pi definitely sounds like a good choice. You could set it up with a large USB hard drive, Deluge, SAMBA, and SSH. You would need to use SSH for the initial setup, but very rarely after that. The Deluge Web UI would let you start, stop, pause, and monitor your torrents very easily from a web browser on another computer on your network. SAMBA could then be configured to share the USB hard drive as a Windows (SMB) network share so you can map it as a network drive on any machines on your network. From there you could access downloaded content locally and move it wherever you see fit.

If one of your concerns is easily replicating this setup should something go wrong, which you indicated earlier, that would be very easy with the Raspberry Pi configuration I just described. Since the Raspberry Pi has to be imaged from another computer with an SD card reader, it is very easy to create an image of the SD card once you have the software configured exactly how you want it. This image could be written back to the SD card in the future should you ever need to replace your SD card or otherwise effect recovery. Since the data would be stored on a USB hard drive there is no fear of data loss in this scenario.